The BBC promised to reveal further information about how much it spends on top-name presenters after it released details yesterday of over £360,000 of expense claims made by 13 members of its board.

The release of five years' worth of line by line data from past and present executive board members shone an extraordinarily detailed light into the BBC's inside workings.

Unlike the publication of MPs' expenses, the data was not heavily redacted, save for addresses, and while there were no floating duck houses or second home allowances, the data did throw up a number of eye-catching claims, including:

• The director general, Mark Thompson, claimed more than £3,500 to interrupt two holidays to return to London – on one occasion using a private plane – to deal with separate scandals as well as a series of claims totalling £451.85 in 2004 for eight meetings with BBC executives before he had even joined the corporation.

• The purchase of a £99.99 bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée champagne as an 80th birthday present for Bruce Forsyth in February last year.

• The director of vision, Jana Bennett, who oversees all TV channels and production, spent £1,168 on champagne and flowers for stars in one eight-month period in 2004 as well as other gifts including bottles of Pimms and a "Big Ben teapot [and] teabag rest" costing £30.25.

• She also collected £35 for hair styling for a TV interview as well as a £500 insurance claim on a handbag that was stolen at a business function.

• Thousands of pounds worth of claims for top-flight hotels around the world, meals in top restaurants and expensive leaving dinners, including £2,018.33 for Andy Duncan when he moved to Channel 4 as chief executive.

• An internal staff meeting in April last year costing £1,512.72 and a £1,430.08 meal for 29 people at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, both claimed by Ashley Highfield, the former director of future media and technology.

• Scores of sundries such as the purchase of two iPods and a Sky subscription for Highfield, a £14.99 "QPR history book" by the deputy director general, Mark Byford, in September 2007 and £600 on unused flight tickets for the chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson.

The most high-profile claim was by Thompson for £2,236.90 to fly him and his family back early from a holiday in Sicily on 30 October after the row when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left lewd message on Andrew Sachs's answer machine which were broadcast on Radio 2. Thompson flew back to London to attend an emergency BBC Trust meeting and take charge of the corporation's response .

The BBC said the chairman of the audit committee agreed to pay for the flight and the trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, was also informed. Thompson also claimed for £206 for "business entertainment" for his holiday being cut short.

The director general, who has claimed a total of £77,823.35 in expenses since 2004 – more than any other executive board member – also spent a further £1,277 for the charter of a private Cessna plane in the US in August 2004 when he was called back to the UK from another holiday to deal with an internal investigation into the expenses of Alan Yentob, the creative director and presenter of Imagine.

The corporation originally committed itself to publishing expenses information in the autumn but brought the release forward after a request from the trust. The BBC is in the middle of a lobbying campaign to protect the licence fee, which the government wants to share with other broadcasters, and the move is being seen as necessary, particularly after MPs released theirs. However, it continued to refuse to publish salaries of its star names, fuelling further criticism from politicians.

As part of the huge release of data yesterday, the BBC also revealed the salary bands and top-line expenses of its 50 other highest earners, with Peter Salmon, the new director of its north of England operations, emerging as the corporation's best-paid manager below executive board level, on a salary of between £370,000 and £400,000.

The BBC1 controller, Jay Hunt, collects between £250,000 and £280,000, while her BBC2 counterpart, Janice Hadlow, is on £220,000 to £250,000. Radio controllers – Radio 1's Andy Parfitt, Radio 2's Bob Shennan, Radio 3's Roger Wright and Radio 4's Mark Damazer – earn between £190,000 and £220,000, although Radio 5 Live's Adrian van Klaveren did not make the list of the top 50 earners.

Julie Gardner, the former head of drama for BBC Wales and Doctor Who executive, who is now working in the US, emerged as the second highest spender on hospitality overall, claiming £7,764.51 in 2008-09, just £276.22 less than the director general. BBC executives were briefed on the release of the data by Thompson on Wednesday afternoon. "I'm sure you can imagine how this went down with the people concerned," one insider said.

Thompson defended the move in a speech in Manchester yesterday. "Public expectations about openness, trustworthiness and every kind of value for money are becoming more trenchant, more insistent and more vocal than ever before."

He said the BBC would release more detailed financial information on its executives and top talent, such as how much it spends on presenters' and actors' pay as a total, although he said it would not reveal individual salaries of stars such as Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton – a move that was criticised by politicians.

The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said: "The BBC has made a decent start but this does not go nearly far enough. Politicians have learned the hard way that there is no point being half-hearted when it comes to disclosing how public money is spent. We need full transparency so that licence fee payers know what their money goes on."

The Liberal Democrat culture spokesman, Don Foster, added: "The veil must be lifted even further so that the public can judge whether they are getting good value for money."

But Thompson said it did "not make sense" to disclose individual talent fees. "We operate in an industry where confidentiality is the norm, in which only one of our competitors is themselves subject to freedom of information," he said. "There's a real danger that talent would migrate to broadcasters where confidential information will not be disclosed."